Elman Service
Elman Rogers Service ( born May 18, 1915 in Tecumseh, Michigan; † 14 November 1996) was an American anthropologist.
Service earned his BA in 1941 from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1951 at Columbia University, where he taught from 1949 to 1953. He returned to Michigan back and taught there until 1969, the rest of his academic career, he spent at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He retired in 1985.
While studying in Michigan, he went to it in Spain and fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade against Franco. During World War II he was in the U.S. Army. At Columbia University, he was part of the left Mundial Upheaval Society.
Service explored the Ethnology of Latin American Indians, cultural evolution, and the theory and method of ethnology. He studied cultural evolution in Paraguay and cultures in Latin America and the Caribbean. These studies led him to theories of social systems and the rise of the state as a system of political organization.
He was the Managing Director and Treasurer of the American Ethnological Society and member of the American Anthropological Association.
Theories
Service classified the social evolution in four stages, which are the four levels of political organization at the same time: horde, tribe, chiefdom and state.
He also developed the theory of " boons of management", according to which chief societies evolve, because it was beneficial because of the centralized leadership. The leader helps followers, who are becoming more complex with time, of which the whole community benefits. This ensures the power of the leader and allowed the growth of bureaucratic organization.
Service also provided a theory of integration. He believed that earlier civilizations were not stratified by ownership, but only by unequal political power, not by unequal access to resources. He believed there would be no real conflict between the layers, but only power struggles between the political elite. Monuments arise through voluntary support, not by imposing the leader of the population.
Works
- Tobati: Paraguayan Town ( 1954)
- A Profile of Primitive Culture (1958 )
- Evolution and Culture ( with Marshall Sahlins ) ( 1960)
- Primitive Social Organization (1962 )
- Profiles in Ethnology (1963 )
- The Hunters (1966 )
- Cultural Evolutionism (1971 )
- Origins of the State and Civilization (1975 ) Origins of the state and civilization, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt aM, 1977.